Poster: in-Network Total Order Guarantees Supporting State Machine Replication with P4 Programmable Switches

In this paper we propose P4-based Atomic Multicast (P4mCast), a new in-network atomic multicast protocol to support total order guarantees for State Machine Replication (SMR) in cloud-based fault-tolerant and distributed applications. P4mCast builds on in-network computing, applying leader-based consensus to groups of prominent <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${P 4}$</tex> programmable switches in modern data center networks. P4mCast achieves significantly lower latency overhead in the microseconds scale while increasing the throughput one order of magnitude higher compared to state of the art software-based solutions.